Category Archives: Reading

What Breaks Open the Seed

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“Nature reinvents itself over and over again. This process of constant creation leaves behind a track record of successes and failures, new life forms that live or die depending on their innate genetic flexibility, their ability to find and fit into their own niche. This learning to live with others may take seconds or years or millennia.” – Diana Beresford-Kroeger, Our Green Heart: The Soul and Science of Forests, 41

A second year in Indiana has not prepared me for how startling winter is in the forests, how completely the deciduous woodlands shed their leaves and transform into quiet, desolate fogs of spindly twigs. I am still too used to the coniferous evergreens of the west, where the ponderosas only shrug at the changing seasons.

I started 2024 with two goals in mind: To write more and to read more books. I didn’t keep track of these goals, of course. Famously, I dislike quantifying previous years. I’m more interested in qualitative reflections on the past. This has been a very difficult year for me for a lot of reasons; I know this year has been exceptionally horrifying for so many. A new year won’t change that. Instead, I want to attend to the quality of the days ahead, to the slowness of winter and what possibilities I can find in that slowness.

Maybe it was fitting, then, that the last book I read in 2024 was Our Green Heart, by Irish botanist Diana Beresford-Kroeger, about forest ecology, Celtic history, growth, and the strangeness of forest ecosystems.

I appreciate (and am jealous of) the sense of wonder in Beresford-Kroeger’s prose. Her description of seeds was particularly striking: “Most seeds,” she writes, “carry a dormancy factor, the proteins of their endosperm food supply coiled and folded into resting states that wait for a particular signal. These signals are a form of divination, an assurance strong enough that the seed bets its future on that message. They are not properly understood in science and have not been studied in great depth” (85). Here, there is poetry in unexplained biology. Some seeds evolved to sprout in reaction to heat from wildfires; others evolved to travel far distances, to be eaten and carried off by birds and rodents. Dormant seeds are hard and singular for months or years until the right external prompt cracks them open and they grow into roots, trunks, branches.

When I teach, I emphasize revision as the more important process in writing, more than drafting or research. Recently, I have brought in a novel-revising technique from Jane Smiley’s notion that sentences are either seeds or pebbles. Matt Bell elaborates on this idea in his craft book Refuse to be Done, writing that “If it’s a pebble, it’s just the next sentence and it sits there. But if it’s a seed it grows into something that becomes an important part of the life of the novel. The problem is, you can’t know ahead of time whether a sentence will be a seed or a pebble, or how important a seed is going to be” (Bell 77).

I’ve never before thought of this exercise as an exploration of dormancy. If a sentence, a paragraph, or even an unspoken idea is a seed, that means it is awaiting something external to activate it, to bring it out of its shell. This is not that far from artistic inspiration, almost all of which, I believe, comes from external experience: long walks, a healthy community, traveling someplace new, the changing seasons. At least, these are the things that put me in a writing mood. It’s true that when I’m writing, I never know which ideas will take root and grow. Maybe all writing is secretly fertile in this way.

This past year has felt thoroughly dormant, but this is also normal for me. I live in a shell that I rarely come out of, and for such painfully long periods of time that I think dormancy is my natural state. But I have also been rootless for a decade now, following grad school programs and jobs from town to town, leaving behind friends and family for other valleys. What spark am I waiting for? What divination will finally break me open?

Beresford-Kroeger also finds comfort in the secret and illegal hedge schools that existed in Ireland for “those five hundred years during which the Penal Laws made it illegal for the Irish to teach their children” (35). She describes one school as having been nestled in the wilderness, protected by the landscape. It is partly through these hedge schools that Irish language and culture were passed on from generation to generation, where old knowledge was stored, sustained, kept safe like the dormant trees preserved within seeds. These secret schools were a long-standing form of resistance to the occupying British colonists, who could not stamp out Irish identity through force or erasure, an important lesson for the coming year.

Maybe I’ll take this to heart: Dormancy is protective, not restrictive. In writing, this is true of the stories we want to tell and those that need more time.

In the town I grew up, at a museum of regional history, there happened to be a poetry display I had the privilege of visiting last week. A local poet had her typewriter stationed there, along with post cards, paperclips, fancy paper. When she offered to write me a poem, the prompt I gave was full of the obvious cliches: a new year, getting back into a healthy routine, trying to break out of a sense of stagnation. The poem, of course, was much more thoughtful than my jumbled words. The museum display was full of poems commemorating the beauty of the Coconino National Forest, the huge and ancestral evergreens that loom over my hometown.

This year, I intend to slow down, take my time, pay attention. I don’t want to toss out any seeds thinking they’re only pebbles. I don’t think there’s a magical break between one year and the next, but I do think growth continues, even if that growth only takes the form of preservation. Eventually, once winter has stayed its welcome, the spindly, empty trees in Indiana will sprout their leaves again.

Bell, Matt. Refuse to Be Done: How to Write and Revise a Novel in Three Drafts. Soho Press, 2022.

Beresford-Kroeger, Diana. Our Green Heart: The Soul and Science of Forests. Random House Canada, 2024.

Season

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“I thought moving here had largely been a gesture of love. For the desert. For the lion man. But in that move, I was looking at the horizon, and my imagination ran romantically wild. I forgot how tightly people drew together against everything outside themselves. And I hadn’t realized how ethereal things were—my identity, my beliefs, my life. ” -Amy Irvine, Trespass, 197

Amy Irvine’s memoir about moving to San Juan County with her partner to write and join him as a wilderness conservation advocate is ultimately a story of growth through isolation. Irvine returns to Mormon country despite her father raising her out of the faith. She outgrows her partner and grows into a deeper sense of herself, drawn in stark contrast to the LDS anti-government ranchers despite her intense desire for some, any, social life with the very people who treat her with suspicion.

Isolation invites introspection, and Irvine even explores this fact at an anthropological level, writing that evidence of increasingly elaborate “attention to the dead and to the rituals performed on their behalf actually point to a life that had diminished so much in quality that its participants were looking to the afterworld as an escape. Perhaps too they saw the spirit world world as a place of reward, a place where they would live well for having endured the terrestrial plane—for all the endless labor, the constant vigilance, the pervasive violence, the stifling immobility” that resulted from the transition from nomadic hunter-gatherer cultures to settled domestic agriculture (229).

I am now settling into my second year in Indiana. It is isolating be design. My neighborhood has no sidewalks, for example, and there are very few bike lanes. It is impossible to be a hunter-gatherer here, so life is very settled, interior, rife for introspection. For a memoirist, this is should be a good thing.

Summer was nomadic for me, but now I am ready for a routine and a place to write and cook. I am engaged in a research project about food and agriculture in folk horror movies. I am back to making soup every Sunday (despite the lingering summer heat). I have peaches I want to make into a pie. Ancestrally, I understand the impulse to settle into an agricultural life, despite the isolation involved. Maybe writing, reading, and researching are all rituals for a life to come, another season in the near future.

Irvine, Amy. Trespass: Living at the Edge of the Promised Land. North Point Press, 2008.

Pastiche

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“Alice Munro saw it all. And it doesn’t matter if you’ve never eaten nanaimo bars sitting on the shag carpet at a Grey Cup Party, or carried a pitcher of beer to a table of tipsy grown-ups at a bonspiel, rink rafters thick with cigarette smoke; just as one need not have felt the summer sun fading on a dacha five-days ride from St. Petersburg to metabolize the truths of Chekhov (to whom she is rightly compared) one need not ever have set foot in Canada to understand Munro. 

Because she wrote for all of us, everywhere.” –Jonny Diamond

Describing a collage of particular styles, I shouldn’t be surprised that pastiche shares a root with pasta and pastry and paste. There’s nothing in the word that suggests a process. Paste is cruder than pasta, which is comparatively cruder than pastry. A pastiche might be a paste of references mashed together or the flaky layering of stylistic choices, dependent on the audience’s familiarity with the style imitated.

My familiarity with the Midwest is mostly external. I have lived in Indiana for less than a year. By Midwestern standards, that makes me still a tourist. I don’t know how to imitate the deeper sensibilities of this place. A pastiche of southern Indiana might include corn, basketball, tornadoes, cicadas, and politeness. All superficial images, borderline cliche.

Jonny Diamond, writing in Literary Hub about the similarities his mother shared with the late Alice Munro, creates a pastiche of the Canadian Midwest to demonstrate Munro’s independence from such references. Munro’s fiction looks inward. As a writer, I struggle to stop looking outward at my surroundings, at the billboards and forests and empty storefronts and the enormous sky.

The biggest cliche about the Midwest is the supposedly rampant politeness. Kaveh Akbar even describes it in his debut novel Martyr! In one scene, he writes:

“At the intersection of Iranian-ness and Midwestern-ness was pathological politeness, an immobilizing compulsivity to avoid causing distress in anyone else. Cyrus thought about this a lot. You cooed at their ugly babies, nodded along at their racist bullshit. In Iran it was called taarof, the elaborate and almost entirely unspoken choreography of etiquette that directs every social interaction. Midwestern politeness felt that way too, Cyrus learned, like it was burning cigarette holes in your soul. You bit your tongue, then bit it a little harder. You tried to keep your face still enough to tell yourself you hadn’t been complicit, that at least you weren’t encouraging what was happening around you. To you” (134).

Martyr! is another story that looks inward, to an almost painful degree. It is a character study, layers deep and rich and raw, and though it is neither about Indiana nor Iran, the main character’s presence between both places constitutes many of those layers.

I spent May revising the last dregs of a novel I started writing just shy of ten years ago, shortly after I started this blog. In fact, the first iteration of this novel came to me when I visited Ireland in the summer of 2014. Then, it was a shapeless pastiche of my hometown. Building on feedback from an agent who saw promise in it but declined to represent me, I added layers and layers to the characters. The novel didn’t need more where, but more who and why.

Pastiche is a comfortable place to write from, I think, because it allows me to direct the reader’s attention to something else, a subject outside the text. It replaces layers of interiority with vibe curation, which is certainly enjoyable, the way a good detective story can be. But I also want to practice writing through the layers, rather than skating across a single, flat plane.

Akbar, Kaveh. Martyr! Knopf Publishing Group, 2024.

Kairos

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“Imagine you’re at a bookstore. In one section are time management books that give advice for adapting to a general sense of time scarcity and a world always speeding up: either counting and measuring your bits of time more effectively or buying time from other people. In a different section, you find cultural histories of how we came to see time the way we do and philosophical inquiries into what time even is. If you’re scrabbling for time and feeling burned out, which section would you turn to?” (Odell xiii).

It may be the least understood rhetorical appeal. My students come to class with at least some understanding of ethos, pathos, and logos, but kairos is mysterious, abstract. I sometimes describe it as comic timing, the ability to know when a punchline will land or when to add a joke in an otherwise serious speech. This makes it granular, syntactic, probably reductive.

In the introduction to Saving Time, Jenny Odell distinguishes kairos from its sibling ancient Greek word for time: “Chronos, which appears in words like chronology, is the realm of linear time, a steady, plodding march of events into the future. Kairos means something more like ‘crisis,’ but it is also related to what many of us might think of as opportune timing or ‘seizing the time'” (xvii).

Seizing the moment make more sense to me. Supposedly, Vladimir Lenin said, “There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen.” It’s still not clear to me if the quote is accurate or apocryphal.

I bought Saving Time on a whim in a one-room basement bookstore on Independent Bookstore Day. It was in a “general nonfiction” section alongside history, memoir, science, psychology, and self-help.

I only started reading it today (fittingly, May Day), but because I did not manage my time well this month, the one book I finished in April was Alexandra Teague’s memoir Spinning Tea Cups, about family, time, kitsch, tourism, grief. One line that I keep returning to is the first sentence of an essay titled “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” that reads, “The deadest of all the dead people in our family was my mother’s father” (152).

The sentence is syntactically simple, just a subject (the deadest), a verb (was) and an object (my mother’s father). It is the first sentence in an 18-page essay about the narrator’s grandfather, who died in 1944 aboard the USS Mount Hood. The last phrase, my mother’s father, effectively shrinks seven decades and three generations into three words, while The deadest of all the dead people in my family is an epigenetic treatise, a genealogy. But it’s not the construction of the sentence that gets to me so much as the moment, the atmosphere, in which I read it. This, too, is how kairos works. No matter how much time one spends revising and polishing and perfecting, timing, in the end, is everything.

The Lenin quote is easy to utilize for anything that feels momentous. Venture capitalists pushing new tech have even used it to sell their hype. If it’s not apocryphal, it’s probably about identifying resonance, patterns. Seizing the present crisis and holding firm, not backing down. Odell maintains that kairos is more hopeful because, unlike neatly demarcated and sold units of time, kairos allows us space for contingency, for possibility.

That writing moves away from the author once it has an audience is difficult for a perfectionist like me to contend with. Perhaps writing is to chronos as reading is to kairos. On one side is a long, repetitive process of self-interrogation, of trial and error. On the other is the singular opportunity to collaborate with someone else’s craft, to seize the moment and allow oneself to be moved. And being moved, being open to the contingency that other writers open up to me through their experiences, is the reason I want to read so much in the first place.

Odell, Jenny. Saving Time. Random House, 2023.

Teague, Alexandra. Spinning Tea Cups. Oregon University Press, 2023.

Bookshelves

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“Where exactly do people think they are going? A life can be significant without having a goal, just as a work of art can be. What is the purpose of having children or wearing shocking pink tights? Works of fiction like Tristram Shandy, Heart of Darkness, Ulysses, and Mrs. Dalloway can serve to free us from seeing human life as goal-driven, logically unfolding and rigorously coherent. As such, they can help us to enjoy it more.” -Terry Eagleton (114).

This Christmas, I asked my dad if I had too many books. It was hardly a joke for how obvious the answer was. If anything, what I need are more shelves for the books I will inevitably accumulate.

My family never misses a chance browse a used bookstore. We locate them like churches, make plans for visits while on the road. The more obscure titles, the more chaos among the shelves, the better.

Among the stacks, there’s a randomness that can’t be replicated by any algorithm. It would take a whole biography to explain how a book came to appear on a shelf, whose hands produced, gifted, read, bought, lost, or relinquished it. Buying books secondhand (or thirdhand or forty-seventhhand) is a way of picking up where someone left off, gambling with time well spent.

Years ago, when I visited my uncle in Appleton, Wisconsin, one of the first things we did was go to a local used bookstore. I don’t remember the name of the bookstore now, but I remember how sunny it was inside, how the outside looked more like a hunting cabin. I remember how familiar my uncle was with the owner, chatting about new artifacts, Indigenous authors, sharing ideas they had read about, both of them listening to each other. How easy he made it look.

I remember buying a paperback novel about, or from, the Cold War, and thinking about a story one of my history professors told me about stumbling across the one manuscript he needed in the trunk of a car near a book fair in Oman.

The first thing I did when I learned that my uncle passed away last month was to go downstairs and stand in front of my bookshelf, scanning the titles, until the sun went down. I’m not really sure why, but it was the only thing I could do that made any sense. I looked at the titles, the books my uncle had given me as gifts, the ones I’d wanted to suggest back.

Since moving to Indiana, I’ve mostly been going to the library for books. The stacks are more curated; there’s less chaos, maybe something I’ve needed. After finishing grad school, I cobbled together a year’s life with odd jobs at a restaurant, a state park, freelancing, and, for a few months, working in a library. That was when the second used bookstore in my Idaho college town closed its doors. The owner and I actually did get to know each other a little. She was talkative and curious, with a thick Boston accent and a penchant for obscure political treatises, the kind you could never find in a library.

The pace of the library is pleasant, though. I was tempted to earmark and underline the copy of Terry Eagleton’s How to Read Literature that I checked out three weeks ago, but instead I resorted to taking photos of paragraphs with my phone. It’s a simple but thoughtful and extremely British text, erudite in the way that’s difficult not to read in Stephen Fry’s voice. I appreciated his generosity with the purpose of literature, how flexible he lets the form be.

Can books help make life more enjoyable? Eagleton contends that books “do not so much contain meaning as produce it” (144). This, too, cannot be replicated algorithmically.

Two Christmases ago, in a bookstore in Missoula, my brother handed me a book he’d found by chance, The True Subject, a collection of lectures writers have given at conferences and workshops. I never would have found it otherwise. In one lecture, Mary Clearman Blew writes of memoir that “any story depends upon its shape. In arranging the scraps that have been passed down to me, which are to be selected? Which are to be discarded? The boundaries of creative nonfiction will always be as fluid as water” (Blew 62).

This month, I’ve been all scraps and no story. For years, I’ve only been able to write in fragments and braids and collages. Some writer friends agree. It’s just where our heads are at these days.

Blew, Mary Clearman. “The Art of Memoir,” in The True Subject, edited by Kurt Brown. Graywolf Press, 1993, pp. 59-63.

Eagleton, Terry. How to Read Literature. Yale University Press, 2019.

Summer is the Time to Finish Reading All the Unfinished Books

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Books!I have a lot of books that I’ve started, but for many different reasons never got around to finishing. Many of them are Christmas presents that I started during the holiday break but put down again shortly after the semester started because schoolwork and teaching overwhelmed my schedule. There are short story collections with dogeared pages where I stopped, and novels with a bookmark still stuck at Chapter Six, and poetry collections with coffee stains where I left off.

To be clear, I appreciate the books as gifts. I went into writing because I love reading. But it’s easy to lose track of time and even easier to start more than I have time to finish. To be greedy, or at least unrealistic. Also I was assigned thirty books between three classes this last semester. Most were good, but it’s difficult to make time for leisurely reading when I have to make arguments about three books a week.

Until August, I hereby vow not to buy any new books. My summer reading list will consist only of books I’ve started reading but never finished, the various gifts and books I bought with the intention of reading in my spare time (back when I believed in such silly things). I have Kim Barnes’s first memoir In the Wilderness, for example, and a few critical theory books I got this last year to catch up on The Discourse™. Yesterday I finished Matt Cashion’s Last Words of the Holy Ghost, a gift from two years ago, and now I’m going to finish Precarious Life by Judith Butler, which I started last month for a paper.

I can’t promise that I won’t start-without-finishing books in the future, but this summer, I hope to make amends for years and years of this moral failing on my part.

-jk

 

The Dogsitting Writing Residency

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Two dogs“Commensalism or mutual benefit is a constitutive premise of housesitting, or maybe an enabling fiction. The housesitter is apt to recognize the opportunity as a private windfall, and the pleasure is tandem: first in his own dis-habituation, and then in the adoption of a new readymade home, a vacated life to try on. With the extra keys on his chain, the housesitter leaves work on a different train or by a new road, becomes a local in the café or dogpark, creates or stars in fantasies grown out of his new neighbors’ notice.”
-Brian Blanchfield, “On Housesitting,” from Proxies.

Like a lot of writers, I’ve never had a writing residency. Applications for residencies are expensive and highly competitive, and travel is even more expensive and time-consuming. Like a lot of writers, I don’t have the time or resources to travel to another country and write for a month, as much as I want to. But I can construct my own version of a residency with occasional opportunities and a little creativity.

For example, I’m currently dog-sitting for some relatives in Pullman, Washington, just six miles from Moscow but in a subtly different environment. Pullman is full of hills and mosquitoes, whereas Moscow is comparatively flat and full of earthworms. I’m in charge of a few tasks around the house, cleaning, taking out the trash on trash days, but most importantly I’m in charge of two good but regularly loud dogs. It’s been a week so far, and they are starting to get used to me.

I also have access to a large table, the internet, a coffee maker, and a view of the neighborhood. It’s not a real writing residency; I’m not funded to go wander the hills of Pullman and get acquainted with the local mosquitoes, and the dogs’ needs, of course, take precedence over writing. But it’s a chance to use my time wisely.

Since settling in last Saturday, I’ve revised one essay, written another essay, submitted fifteen various essays and stories to journals, and read a handful of essays from various collections (out of order like a heretic). By the time I leave Pullman, I’ll have been productive. I don’t have much of an excuse not to be.

This isn’t exactly a vacation, though, not a real one. Everything is borrowed and temporary. Everything comes with a caveat that I’m a stranger. I’ve been thinking about Brian Blanchfield’s essay about housesitting for friends and colleagues. The notion that housesitting is trying on another life is apt. This is a life I’m not used to, one I have to learn, and am responsible for maintaining in the absence of this life’s real inhabitants. I’m not quite a guest, nor a visitor, and also not exactly a steward.

Stranger still is that Pullman in May is very green, and it’s been rainy and overcast but also somewhat warm, and I wandered around town the other day between showers, passing neighborhoods filled with so many plants that I sometimes didn’t realize there were houses, and as such the city keeps reminding me of Galway, Ireland. I even found an Irish pub downtown, something I haven’t seen since living in Lincoln. I went in for a drink, wishing I could stay, or bring my laptop and write and read in the corner and be moody with the dark wood decorum around me. But I couldn’t stay, because this isn’t a real residency.

This place, in its slight and uncanny differences too subtle to classify but too monumental to miss, makes me want to travel, to break out of my long-established routine, to be the one who needs a housesitter for a change. I know this will never happen, for a lot of reasons. But I can still accomplish as much as a real residency with what little I have. And of course I’ll never say no to access to dogs. Just look at them.

-jk

 

Making Room for More Books

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BooksYou can never have too many books, unless you have too few bookshelves. Recently, I’ve accumulated about three dozen more books than I had at the beginning of the year, but I’m not ready to get a new bookshelf. I don’t have room for one in my apartment, unless I put a small bookshelf in the shower or above the toilet or next to the heaters, and all of those options have their pitfalls (water, fire, weird smells).

So, I sat down in front of my bookshelves and pulled out a handful of books that I no longer need or want, for the foreseeable future. Mostly, I chose books I had purchased for past English classes as an undergrad and from my MA program. Others were books I bought, read, used, and simply have to sacrifice now. It became easy to identify books I hadn’t thought about in a long time. It was harder to pull them out and not identify a possible need each one. I’ve found uses for books I’ve forgotten about, or loaned them to others who could use them. Other books I want to reread when I have the time (whenever that will be, sometime down the road, possibly in sixty years). Soon, I had a small stack of books I was willing to donate to a local used bookstore for store credit.

I won’t be buying new books for a while. I already have plenty to read, for class and for pleasure. This semester, I have thirty books in total for classes, plus books for research projects for class assignments, plus whatever books I can read for fun. Last semester, I set out to familiarize myself with a few standard critical theory texts, but that has fallen by the wayside amid the novels, memoirs, biographies, essay collections, and cultural histories I’m reading this Spring.

I may need another bookshelf soon. When I moved to Moscow, I had five creative nonfiction books. Now, I have two shelves devoted to the genre I’m pursuing, and I have two more years in the program. It’s good to make room for the new and dispense with the old. It’ll be better to cultivate room for expertise.

I have a biography of Janis Joplin, a critical reflection on the Talking Heads album Fear of Music, and Rebecca Solnit’s collection of cultural biographies The Encyclopedia of Trouble of Spaciousness. I have John McPhee’s book about oranges (just oranges) and W. E. B. Du Bois’s biography of John Brown and Virginia Woolf’s unfinished memoir. I have Ta-Nehisi Coates’s letter to his son and James Baldwin’s letter to his nephew and Franz Kafka’s letter to his father. Creative nonfiction encompasses journalism, memoir, reflection, and criticism. I need an entire library of creative nonfiction to cultivate a proper expertise. Though I had to remove some books to make room for more, right now I think I have a pretty good start.

-jk

Reading and Road Trips

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Crested ButteTwo weeks ago, I graduated from UNL with a Master’s degree in English. It is the result of two years of reading, writing, and writing about what I read. More importantly, I had the pleasure of spending time with the friends and colleagues I worked with this past year. To celebrate the end of the semester and our program, several folks in my graduate cohort took a vacation by driving from Lincoln, Nebraska, to Crested Butte, Colorado, for a weekend next to a river. Soon, we will scatter and go our separate ways, and the slice of time we gave one another without responsibility, without the need to work for someone else, without tasks to fulfill, was a small slice of heaven (which is, as we all know, a place on Earth).

Right now, I have a summer of road trips planned ahead of me. I have been accepted into the MFA program at the University of Idaho, in Moscow (the fun Moscow). I’ll be driving there from Lincoln soon with part of my family, then through Montana and Idaho to visit a variety of relatives, then back to Flagstaff, Arizona, before driving back to Montana and Idaho a month later. I’ll be spending a lot of time in a car.

When a handful of English Majors go on a road trip, they take books with them, and for me it’s always been that way. As long as I can remember, I’ve taken long road trips every summer from Arizona across the Rockies to Montana, Idaho, Utah, Oregon, Washington, and California, and I’ve always taken a book with me. One summer, I read On the Road by Jack Kerouac. Another summer, I read The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. On this most recent road trip, I read The Motorcycle Diaries by Ernesto Che Guevara, and to continue my step in the left direction through summer reads, I think I’ll take along Terrorism and Communism by Leon Trotsky, which I hear is a pleasant beach read.

I’ve spent the last two years reading more books than I expected, various novels, historical texts, books on theory, books on the Russian Revolution of my own volition, craft essays, and several Nigerian plays. It is telling that, on my first break from grad school, I continued to read. The same is true of my friends who went to Crested Butte.

I have a lot going on this summer, much to look forward to and much to fear. I could blog about going to a new graduate program in creative writing or the college-industrial complex after surviving it for two more years or moving to a new state again. But right now the only things I want to do are read and spend time (reading) with my friends. I even hear talk of a Kafka/Marxist reading group in the making.

-jk

Getting Over the Beats

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on-the-road

“We’re all golden sunflowers inside, bae.” -Allen Ginsberg, probably

In high school, I took a creative writing elective, and the teacher assigned numerous Beat Generation authors. We read sections of Dharma Bums and “Howl” and numerous Jack Kerouac poems. It turns out that the influence of the Beats on a youngboredsmallwhitemale is that he starts wearing black button-up shirts and fantasizing about expensive liquor. After reading On the Road the following summer, I spent a great deal of time fantasizing about drinking absinthe on road trips through the desert at night while listening to something called bop. I bought used jazz records that I listened to once, maybe twice.

I thought about rebelling, but I was convinced that the key to rebellion was originality, and just about everything had been done before. I learned the value of originality from the Beats, who were apparently the very first people to realize that dharma and karma fall under the category of “hip.” I learned more from various articles summarizing the Beat Generation that I found online to save time, and it was there that I discovered how powerful single  arbitrary out-of-context half-cited quotes can be, even with no subsequent explanation. I thought about growing out my hair, learning how to sculpt with metal, driving a motorcycle, making out with trees, but they had all been done before.

As time went on, I encountered other writers and poets who influenced me in more nuanced, healthier ways. Had I kept up with my Beat fixation, I might have grown up to the kind of person who uses Kerouac quotes to make myself feel better about spending fifteen dollars on one local IPA at a bar I frequent only because the regular server is an aspiring country saxophonist named Cynthia. Or I could have become the kind of teacher who wears skinny dungarees and Pink Floyd T-shirts with holes in the front and sits on the desk telling his students that Jesus and Steinbeck were both Zen masters who shared some sweet flashbacks to one another.

I still dig the Beats sometimes, but that scene has passed. I’m still not sure what kind of writer I am, but I can’t be a Beat, or any other writer from the past. It’s better to write for and from the present. I’ve almost entirely moved on, man.

-jk